The recent Essex County Council announcement about so-called "rapid transit" for the East Colchester garden community development has perhaps received insufficient attention in the election run-up.

But this one factor actually exposes as nonsense the whole current notions of our political leaders in three major ways.

Firstly, the "rapid transit" scheme itself is revealed to be, as we said at the inquiry it would be, merely buses on the ordinary roads between the town centre and Essex University.

It is routed via Magdalen Street and Barrack Street, where no significant bus priority is physically achievable, and Hythe station (four minutes' wait when a train is coming).

We are not enlightened as to why they should have now chosen this route, instead of the previously-aired East Hill route, at a time when everybody seems to be agreed on reducing traffic in the High Street (i.e increasing the traffic in Magdalen Street).

Anyway, this glorious scheme is what they are now telling us will get half the residents of the garden city to switch from car to bus.

Secondly, Colchester Council and Essex County Council are purporting to be planning together a "new transport policy" for Colchester to reduce congestion at large.

As Essex County Council will be largely responsible in practice, and as the rapid transit scheme clearly represents its notions of the very best thing it can offer, we can already guess how unradical the rest is likely to be, and foresee this new initiative is going to be no more likely to change the world than the several previous "new transport policies" were.

Thirdly, the paying of consultants to produce a rapid transit scheme purely for the existing Colchester East garden community site, that would be of no use if any other sites were adopted, just further demonstrates how all four councils involved are shamelessly making a mockery of the Planning Inspector's demand they must spend time reconsidering all the other possible garden development sites from scratch before they proceed with further work on details of any site.

The same point applies to the highly expensive diversion of the A12 purely to fit in the West Tey garden community.

Yet at the same time the councils are also pretending that they are consulting on all the alternative sites.

Peter Kay

Park Road, Wivenhoe